Hegar
@Hegar@fedia.io
- Comment on Microsoft Just Killed the "Cover for Me" Excuse: Microsoft 365 Now Tracks You in Real-Time 3 days ago:
I don't think it's wise to believe tech oligarchs saying that orwellian surveillance tech cannot be exploited for orwellian surveillance.
Besides companies can just require employees to opt in - "we just built this fresh horror, how companies use it is up to them" doesn't really fly.
- Comment on California governor Gavin Newsom accuses TikTok of suppressing content critical of the current US president Donald Trump 6 days ago:
Let's just share the news please.
Gavin Newsom's presidential campaign paying to insert his name in headlines should not be shared.
- Comment on Evolutionary Planetary 1 week ago:
Fascinating! I've really enjoyed your posts today. Keep the hits coming!
- Comment on Unbridled Power 1 week ago:
Woo, grasses! Let's hear it for C4 photosynthesis! 🎉
- Comment on To independently invent the concept of writing in which sounds are encoded into symbols from which an infinite number of words can be assembled, you must be a genius 1 week ago:
At it's origins, the Latin script was an alphabet, not 1:1 symbol to word.
You have to go back through a chain of different scripts for different languages from different cultures that influenced it to get to heiroglyphs.
Chinese characters were logograms invented for Chinese and are logograms used for Chinese today. At their origin they were pretty much symbol = word and it mostly still is.
- Comment on To independently invent the concept of writing in which sounds are encoded into symbols from which an infinite number of words can be assembled, you must be a genius 1 week ago:
The chinese kinda did just make a character for each word though.
Modern chinese uses plenty of words with multiple characters but Old chinese didn't really. So character = word was much closer to the truth around the time of the oracle bone inscriptions.
- Comment on I don't understand how Trump gets away with all his senial BS. How come everyone is telling him to piss off or use the constitution to shut him the hell up? 2 weeks ago:
30% of US adults voted for trump.
Decades of gerrymandering, voter suppression, disinfo campaigns and no small amount of outright fraud brought the current regime to power, not the will of american people.
- Comment on I don't understand how Trump gets away with all his senial BS. How come everyone is telling him to piss off or use the constitution to shut him the hell up? 2 weeks ago:
Because trump is largely irrelevant.
His job is distraction-in-chief. He's just a dumb patsy - a role he's spent his life perfecting.
His business career was just laundrering russian mob money, and his political career is just drawing fire from the rich cabal looting the american empire before there's nothing left to loot.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
There was a hilarious study the other month showing that on r/conservative, 30-60% of posts on any given day are 2 posters, who posted every single day - except the day that ukraine strikes knocked out power in moscow.
- Comment on I’ve hit a wall with tech. 2 weeks ago:
That sounds like a reasonable and healthy attitude to take.
I've started buying 2nd hand physical games, got a cheap record player, buy books from little bookshops, clothes from goodwill and don't shop online. Not ready for a dumb phone yet.
I grew up in niave 90s with 'internet will set us free' thinking. But oligarchs turned the things i liked into poison, so i avoid drinking the poison as much as i can.
- Comment on Such a dreamy guy 2 weeks ago:
Jate isn't a name.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
People always seem to think killing hitler would help, but part of the reason no one assassinated him is because the allies wanted hitler alive to continue making terrible decisions.
Imagine how much worse the first trump regime would've been if trump wasn't making any of the decisions - we don't have to imagine because we're living it now.
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 4 weeks ago:
Back in the 60s, Phil Ochs described a liberal as "10 degrees to the left of center in good times and 10 degrees to the right if it affects them personally".
I agree that most people understand it to mean anyone left of center, but the meaning of a weak or disingenuous leftist who often sides with the enemies of the left goes back a while.
- Comment on xkcd #3186: Truly Universal Outlet 5 weeks ago:
Wooo! IEC type I! Shoutout to the greatest!
- Comment on better? 1 month ago:
When people don't like the present, they almost always assume the past was better. When people are broadly happy with the way things are, they argue the past was worse.
Our take on the past almost always says more about our take on the present rather than anything true about the past.
- Comment on It's just not something I could ever get behind 1 month ago:
Wait so you would rather have shallot bread than garlic bread?
Shallot > onion is just common sense, but let's not go dragging garlic into a fight it has no part in.
- Comment on Longing, Rusted, Seventeen, Daybreak, Furnace, Nine, Benign, Homecoming, One, Boxcar 1 month ago:
Yep! It's called primary endosymbosis and it's one of the coolest things around! (I think.) The endpoint of a process where two parts of symbiotic relationship morph into an organ in an organism.
The first case of primary endosymbosis resulted in the mitochondria and thus all multicellar life. That's pretty cool.
Another time created the chloroplast and thus all plantlife. Again, yay for primary endosymbiosis!
A few years ago scientists discovered that it happened really recently, resulting in an organism with a "nitroplast" for in house nitrogen fixing. So in the far distant future there could be an entirely novel branch of life, potentially as different from what we know as redwoods are from cats.
- Comment on Longing, Rusted, Seventeen, Daybreak, Furnace, Nine, Benign, Homecoming, One, Boxcar 1 month ago:
Mitochondria are so much more than that!
They have the ability to kill the cell as well as provide power, they can communicate and transfer resources to other mitochondria, and they might be one of the reasons that organisms need sleep.
I heard a science communicator suggest that in some senses, we might just exist to serve the needs of our mitochondria.
- Comment on ChatGPT Is The Most Blocked Bot And .Christmas Is The Most Dangerous Domain 1 month ago:
It was almost certainly written by gpt, you can tell because it doesn't make any sense but still manages to be objectively incorrect.
Information already is knowledge, and that's not what gpt does.
- Comment on It Only Takes A Handful Of Samples To Poison Any Size LLM, Anthropic Finds 1 month ago:
I don't know that it's wise to trust what anthropic says about their own product. AI boosters tend to have an "all news is good news" approach to hype generation.
Anthropic have recently been pushing out a number of headline grabbing negative/caution/warning stories. Like claiming that AI models blackmail people when threatened with shutdown. I'm skeptical.
- Comment on The problems Mothers have to deal with 1 month ago:
She's depicted here with dark hair, she's just wearing a yellow headdress.
- Comment on The problems Mothers have to deal with 1 month ago:
There's a great story in i think the pseudepigrapha, where child jesus is playing with his friends and gets upset and turns one of his friends into a pillar of salt and mary comes and yells at him to turn the kid back.
- Comment on You've probably met someone who has killed a person 1 month ago:
This this this. It's basically impossible to get that rich without having endangered others.
- Comment on If you didn't vote, the current state of things is partially your fault 1 month ago:
Being angry at normal people because the rich have the ability to buy elections is not productive.
After decades of gerrymandering, voter suppression, disinfo, foreign interference, dark money and legalized bribery, US elections just do not reflect the will of our population. A famous princeton study showed that no major policy initiative has reflected public opinion since the civil rights era. It's conclusion was that functionally we are an oligarchy and not a democracy.
The rich who run the show deserve the scorn and blaming anyone but them helps them.
- Comment on Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)? 1 month ago:
North and south are fundementally different, climate and biosphere -wise, so i don't think it would ever make sense to people to modify the same word to describe two very different things. East and west maybe less so, but dawn and dusk are pretty important differences.
Some polynesian cultures use two main direction words, which usually translate as something like mountain-ward and beach-ward.
- Comment on Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)? 1 month ago:
You gotta say "nor-nor-east" instead, that's a blast.
- Comment on Temperature sensitivity feels like it should distinct 1 month ago:
There are several more. My favourite is proprioception - the sense of where your limbs are. Phantom limb syndrome exists because we have proprioception.
- Comment on coleoptera master race 1 month ago:
This was just a top notch meme. Informative and a very clever arrested developement reference.
- Comment on Samsung reveals first tri-fold phone 1 month ago:
I guess i don't really see the point. Is there a strong use case out there, or is this a marge's potato? ("I just think they're neat")
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 2 months ago:
I was careful to say perminant heirarchies for that reason. Bao Jingyan said that power originates in the contrast between the weak and the strong, and the cunning and the naive. I'm inclined to agree.
But we can have social institutions that break up and flush out these natural channels of inequality, rather than institutions that metastize them into heirarchies.
Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen. We could tax all inheritance above say 500k at 100%. Eliminate all personal debt every 7 years.
There's a lot we can do to make heirarchies more temporary.